this post was submitted on 29 Sep 2026
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That's a lot of ifs.
And for what it's worth, the concorde had afterburner-free cruising. It needed them for takeoff only.
And keep in mind that fuel prices are much higher now than in the 90-00s.
Yeah, the Concorde was interesting in that its design was optimized for cruising, so that taxiing, takeoff, and reaching cruise altitude/speed took a gargantuan amount of fuel compared to other aircraft and even to its own cruising efficiency.
I can see why someone could look at that and assume that they could do better with modern design principles, including the knowledge that planes need way more passenger seats to improve the per passenger efficiency.
Then again, the company that took the most concrete steps towards developing a supersonic engine pivoted to creating gas turbines for AI data centers (but was just dropped by its major customer on that, so who knows what they do next).
The original was already pretty packed (I visited it) and there's a limit to how little leg room you can take away from someone paying concorde prices for a flight...
And keep in mind that many of the recent advances in planes revolve around high - bypass designs which only work subsonic if I'm not mistaken.
And before then, the concorde was already 3-4x more fuel per seat...
Yeah, I'm not an aerospace guy, but I'm wondering whether the maturity of the commerical passenger air travel industry has lessons to adopt for the 60 years since the Concorde was designed. The cabin and fuselage were so small that there's not a lot of room for different seating configurations, the over-land speed restrictions limited its feasible routes.
I'm middle of the road when it comes to optimism about whether commercial supersonic flight will approach business class prices within the next 2 or 3 decades, and whether such a service could one day be environmentally equivalent to the 2026 impact of 2026 commerical air travel.